Lifeboat Foundation

Next January Stephen Hawking will be 74 years old. He has lived much longer than most individuals with his debilitating condition. In addition to being an unquestionably gifted cosmologist, he has invited controversy by supporting the pro-Palestinian, Israel-BDS boycott and warning about the dangers of alien invaders who tap into our interstellar greetings

Antisemitism, notwithstanding, this man is a mental giant. He is Leonardo. He is Einstein. Like them, his discoveries and theories will echo for generations beyond his life on earth. He is that genius.

Forty years ago, when Stephen Hawking still had mobility, he delivered a paper on a mystery regarding information-loss for entities that cross the event boundary of a black hole.

In the mid 1970s, Astronomers were just discovering black holes and tossing about various theories about the event horizon and its effect on the surrounding space-time. Many individuals still considered black holes to be theoretical. Hawking’s analysis of the information paradox seemed extremely esoteric. Yet, last month (Aug 2015) , at Sweeden’s KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Hawking presented a possible solution to the paradox that he sparked.

Continue reading “Stephen Hawking speaks with virtually no muscular movement” »

Two black holes, circling one another on their way to merging together, can create ripples in spacetime, but the waves are weaker than previously thought.

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The dimensionless aspect, since it has no dimensions, is outside of space and time. This is the key aspect to existence: an aspect outside of space and time perpetually interacting dialectically with an aspect inside space and time. All of the weird and wonderful phenomena of the universe are the products of this ultimate dichotomy.

http://youtu.be/MbRda_sCgkQ

Does this sound crazy? Then consider the evidence provided by black holes.

The R = 0 Universe.

Continue reading “The dimensional aspect of existence is associated with the dimensions of space and time.” »

When scientists spotted this pair of black holes, it was a rare chance to observe black holes in the process of colliding. Soon, however, as they looked closer, scientists were consumed with a brand new question: Uh, hey, what’s that blinking light?

The light isn’t coming from the pair of colliding black holes (named PG 1302-102) 3.5 billion light years away from us, it’s coming from the turbulence around them. What that doesn’t explain, though, is why the light “flashes” rhythmically—regularly brightening, then dimming. So researchers Daniel D’Orazio, Zoltan Haiman, and David Schiminovich at Columbia University built a simulation of the pair and have now come up with an explanation for just what we’re seeing.

It’s the orbit of the black holes.

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As a follow-up to Shailesh Prasad’s thought provoking video (just below this article), I offer two equally impressive visualizations of the scope and magnificence of our universe. These videos are the epitome of a teachable moment. And it’s fun, too!

Check out this simple, one-button interactive Scale of the Universe by Cary Huang. Simply pull a slider left or right to zoom in or out. It covers the Universe from 10²⁷ meters down to 10^-35 meters (from the entire universe to the Plank length and quantum foam).

Charles and Ray Eames

Unlike the classic film by Charles & Ray Eames (more about that later), the zoom doesn’t really take viewers closer or further away. Rather, it compares relative size by allowing users navigate by magnitudes (a circle indicates each power-of-ten).

Continue reading “Scale of the Universe revisits ‘Powers of Ten’” »

For those who missed this.

By all counts, Earth is on a one way trip to oblivion. Our aging Sun will see to that. Within 500 to 900 million years from now, photosynthesis and plant life on Earth will reach a death-spiral tipping point as the Sun continues its normal expansion and increases in luminosity over time.

Trouble is, researchers are still unsure about all the grisly endgame details, and their models of such slow motion horrors are hard to test. But a team of researchers now say that finding and observing nearby aging Earth-analogues, undergoing the ravages of their own expanding sun-like stars, will help Earth scientists understand how the stellar evolution of our own sun will affect life here on Earth.

Continue reading “Lessons From Dying Extrasolar Earths” »

Black holes are known to have many strange properties, such as that they allow nothing—not even light—to escape after falling in. A lesser known but equally bizarre property is that black holes appear to “know” what happens in the future in order to form in the first place. However, this strange property arises from the way in which black holes are defined, which has motivated some physicists to explore alternative definitions.

They reported a new area law in general relativity that is based on an interpretation of black holes as curved geometric objects called “holographic screens.”

“The so-called teleology of the black hole event horizon is an artifact of the way in which physicists define an event horizon: the event horizon is defined with respect to infinite future elapsed time, so by definition it ‘knows’ about the entire fate of the universe,” Engelhardt told Phys.org. “In general relativity, the black hole event horizon cannot be observed by any physical observer in finite time, and there isn’t a sense in which the black hole as an entity knows about future infinity. It is simply a convenient way of describing black holes.”

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Great news. It’ll be fascinating to see what they discover.

In the distant reaches of the Universe, exploding stars and supermassive black holes are bending the very fabric of spacetime. It’s hard to wrap our brains around such tremendous forces, but we may be able to quantify them, in the form of gravitational waves. A new European Space Agency mission marks humanity’s first bold attempt to do so in outer space.

This fall, the ESA’s LISA Pathfinder will be blasted into space on a course for the L1 Lagrange point. Situated nearly a million miles from Earth, it’ll begin pilot-testing fundamental technologies for the detection of elusive gravitational waves. The miniature science observatory bid farewell to the public this week, on display at a test centre in Ottobrunn, Germany for the last time before its long journey.

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Astronomers have discovered a galaxy is being powered by a quasar that contains two black holes whirling about each other.

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